New house smells like a charity shop

[HettyMeg]

We moved into our new house, which is a bit of a renovation project, last week. We knew it needed modernising but weren't prepared for the grime and smell. Older person who never seemed to open the windows.

The carpets look relatively OK but there is a musty smell that reminds me of charity shops and leaving all windows open hasn't done much to shift it. We've taken down old stained blinds but left the curtains for now but probably going to replace these to try and fix the smell. Do those rug doctors / similar carpet cleaners work? I am pregnant so more sensitive to smell than usual but my DH also says it's really strong.

Should add, new flooring is on the list of things we want to do but we won't get to it for a few months, due to other work happening first, so want to find a solution to tackle the smell in the meantime

Can you source an ozone machine

I'd get rid of all the carpets and put down temporary runners/rugs.

Get the carpets professionally cleaned and just dump the curtains.

Just get rid of the carpets. Bare floorboards or concrete would be better than smelly old carpets. Pointless spending money on them of you'll be replacing them soon anyway.

So would i and if you need to keep the current curtains for a while i would stick them all in the washing machine with a hefty dose of conditioner ,you can always put them back up slightly damp if you can't dry outside.

Get cheap replacement curtains from B&M or similar and just ditch what's there - they will have soaked up all the smells!
I would also ditch all carpets unless they were really good quality ones, in which case it's worth the attempt of shampooing etc. You can rent carpet cleaners from supermarkets. But if they were old manky carpets, I'd prefer to ditch and use rugs.

I think old wallpaper can also retain smells so that will need stripping too!

Since you are pg, could you stay somewhere else while that's going on and focus on getting a bedroom and bathroom totally liveable while the rest gets redecorated in time?

It will take at least 6 months to shift ingrained odours but they’ll go eventually.

Not sure I'd want to as we have a child in the house

It's likely to be months before we get to them though so not sure I can live with bare floorboards until then - main reason being we have a young child so I think I'd be worried

Good point about the wallpaper, this is in the biggest room downstairs so it could be playing a part. We originally were planning to do kitchen ASAP and bathroom within two years but now have moved bathroom up as the previous owners have left it in a worse state than we were expecting so is now an immediate priority. We can live with walls etc not being perfect for a while

Six months 😵

Take down the curtains, remove the carpets, and have the walls and ceilings washed. Strip all wallpaper.

Get a professional company in to deep clean the kitchen, including inside all the cabinets and cupboards.

It's a smell of ancient dust. When we moved into our house the smell was awful - a sort of mixture of prawn and sewage. I was scared they had taken against us as new owners and sewn prawns into the curtains!
Within a few days, and a fair bit of cleaning, it smelled better. Keep windows open, clean and disinfect all bathrooms and hard floors, flush all the drains with bleach or drain cleaner, wash curtains, hoover lots & you can get carpet freshener that hoovers up. You can also sugar soap the wallpaper.
My friend moved into a house of a heavy smoker, and they spent weeks scrubbing everything to get rid of the nicotine stains, but it can be done.

Thank you all, some good tips. Have also booked professional cleaner

I would take down curtains and wash in the bath. Give them a good soak with a bio powder then wash on a low temperature. Then hang outside until nearly dry then hang back in house.
If they shrink a bit who cares.

We pulled up all carpets and threw away the curtains. Did not regret one bit. Put up with floorboards for 2 years. Sugar soaped all walls and ceilings 3x. Sprayed a water solution I made up with essential oils everywhere often. Windows open all day. Plug ins.

Bought a rug runner for landing off Amazon. Got a large rug for lounge from Ikea sale. 2year old was fine :) just buy cheap curtains for must have rooms. Dunelm linen curtains are cheap for lounge:)

What are you worried about?? I have had old floorboards with a few rugs since my dd was a baby. Much more practical, stylish and hygienic than manky old carpets.

I'd always outsource carpet cleaning, especially when smell is the issue. Purely because unless you know what you're doing and use good products, making the carpet wet and scrubbing it a bit can increase the smell tenfold.

Cleaning the carpets is a waste of money. They will dry and STILL smell like an old wet dog - in fact from previous experience it will smell worse than it did before you washed them! Only way to get rid of the smell is throw all the curtains blinds carpets and underlay and paint everything else

I was invited to an elderly neighbours 80th bday. I went, afterwards several people commented on the smell, not nasty more concern, curiosity. More of a WHF shocked kind of way. We then realised it must be her carpet as she is clean, she is tidy, she is not well off being a widow so mustn't have had the carpets cleaned for 20 plus years. It was awful. I sort of feel like I should tell her, but think she would be offended. The stench is real. Noone could eat anything.

Thank you, we actually pulled down and binned all of the blinds as they were stained anyway, and we have replaced the biggest curtain in the house so hoping that helps.

Wouldn't have thought to sugar soap the walls, thanks. Yes we are getting the place rewired at the moment and they've lifted all carpets. We're probably going to tell them not to put them back down.

It's not the floorboards I'm worried, it's the little spiky grippers around the edges.

@Lexibletheflexible
@Nearly50omg
This is my worry, we aren't experienced carpet cleaners and the concern is that even if we pay, it still might smell.